Two accounts of revolutionary Iran, Days of God by James Buchan and
Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy, shed a subtle light on events, says
Sameer Rahim.

In October 1971, the Shah of Iran celebrated 2,500 years of monarchy at a grand ceremony at Persepolis. Thousands of actors in Ancient Persian uniform paraded past foreign dignitaries including the Duke of Edinburgh. (The Queen sent her apologies.) When asked why a French restaurant was catering, the Shah, showing rather less enthusiasm for Iran’s culinary heritage, snapped back: “What am I supposed to do, give them bread and radishes?” Dinner was washed down with 25,000 bottles of wine. The extravaganza was rumoured to have cost $200 million.

Iranians watching on television were unimpressed. Their Shah was a parvenu whose father, Reza, had overthrown the Qajars in a military coup in 1921. Reza modelled his rule on Turkey’s Atatürk, upsetting his subjects by enforcing Western dress and banning the veil. His son Mohammad Reza was more interested in the high life – one of his numerous lovers was Grace Kelly – and all through his reign contended with threats from both radical Leftists and Islamic clerics.

One cleric would prove his nemesis. Ruhollah Khomeini, born in 1902 in rural Iran, openly declared his opposition to the Shah in 1964. When a law was passed granting diplomatic immunity to US soldiers in Iran, Khomeini railed: “Even if the Shah were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah… no one will have the right to interfere with him.” These comments forced him into exile to Iraq, from where he watched the Persepolis celebrations with horror. In 1979 he would have his revenge.

The Shah’s imperial folly and overthrow are described grippingly in two new accounts. Michael Axworthy, a former British diplomat who headed the Iran Office from 1998-2000, in Revolutionary Iran (****) takes in the recent history of the Islamic Republic from the optimistic thaw under Mohammad Khatami (president from 1997-2005) to the disastrous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Packed with gobbets of information and policy advice on how to deal with Iran, this feels like a book designed for William Hague’s bedside table.

Days of God(*****)by the novelist James Buchan (Persian expert and grandson of John Buchan) is more elegant and pugnacious than Axworthy. His account focuses on the revolution and ends with Khomeini’s death in 1989. Buchan, who lived in Iran in the Seventies, is unafraid of making judgments. The Shah’s absurdity is on full display but so are his achievements. During his reign, Iran grew economically, and though repressive, his rule was not thoroughly dictatorial. The number of people who perished in the 1978 cinema fire in Abadan (422), which was started by Khomeini’s supporters, was greater than all those done to death by the Shah.

If there was no compelling economic or political reason for the revolution then how did it happen? The answer is Khomeini, the enigma at the heart of both books. Axworthy’s description of his “simple, direct, charismatic leadership” is right but we should not underestimate his originality or cunning. In the absence of a divinely guided leader – the Prophet Mohammad or one of his saintly descendants called Imams – the Shia clergy have traditionally avoided politics. Khomeini’s theory that a Grand Ayatollah, a kind of Shia Pope, could turn himself into a political leader was wholly new and not widely accepted by most Shia – let alone Sunnis. Returning from exile, Khomeini announced he was appointing the prime minister “through the guardianship that I have from the Holy Prophet”. His statement verged on blasphemous.

Khomeini was always an outsider. The clerical establishment distrusted his dabbling in mysticism – he wrote love poetry and embraced religion’s ecstatic side. This emotional understanding attracted the ordinary Iranian, for whom the stories of their Imams’ oppression and sacrifice were more important than distant Ancient Persia. He showed his cunning by allowing the Leftist revolutionaries to think he would mobilise the masses but then retire when the Shah left. Once in power, though, he ruthlessly discarded his former allies.

The new Islamic Republic had democratic elements: it elected a parliament and president – though religious authorities vetted the candidates, and the Supreme Leader had the final say. Khomeini’s power was tested when Iraq invaded in 1980. The new republic, bolstered by the Shah’s US F-14s, struck back swiftly and made gains. Saddam Hussein was keen on a face-saving peace but Khomeini was intoxicated by victory. A brutal eight-year war followed that cost 200,000 Iranian lives. Only when Saddam used gas was Khomeini forced, in his own words, to “drink the bitter poison” of defeat.

Shortly before his death in 1989, Khomeini made two decisions that still haunt Iran. The Leftists he had outmanoeuvred launched terrorist attacks from Iraq. A furious Khomeini ordered that all political prisoners in Tehran’s Evin prison should be executed. “To show clemency to those who make war on God is simple-minded,” he wrote. Even loyal supporters were shocked when 4,000 prisoners were shot dead. Ayatollah Montazeri, the designated successor as Supreme Leader, could not hide his disgust. He was stripped of his titles and put under house arrest. In 2009, he came to prominence as the spiritual leader of the pro-democracy Green movement. The other blunder was the death sentence on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, which needlessly damaged Iran’s relationship with the West for years.

Governments built on charismatic personalities are tough to sustain once they are gone. Axworthy ends his book with an appeal to Western policymakers to extend the hand of friendship, even if it is slapped away. Buchan ends by hinting that the current Supreme Leader, the leaden and authoritarian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will compromise on the nuclear issue if the regime is under threat. The next test will be June’s presidential election. If the new man is a reformer he will have to battle the Supreme Leader, whose duty is to impose Khomeini’s will from beyond the grave.